Berkeley's Idealism | Philosophy Tube 

Well, as some who loves quantum mechanics and quantum physics, the idea that something doesn’t exist until it is observed doesn’t seem too odd to me.

Whatever form Plato is now, I bet he's pissed.

Wow, seeing 4-years-prior Olly and comparing him to current Olly.... just goes to show he's been hot this whole time.

Thank you! I've been saying for years that science is not concerned with veracity but verisimilitude. This is why newtonian physics is still taught even though we know it's not "true": it allows us to make good predictions about the future over a fairly broad scope of spacetime.

Have you read Borges' "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius"? There, Borges, imagines a world where this idealism is considered common sense and materialism (something doesn't need to be perceived to exist) is heresy. Also, besides that the whole story is a astoundin, he imagines everything, from how are their idealist lifes, to the kind of language they have.

I refute it thusly *kicks rock

Love the way you explain things so clearly. Thanks for devoting your time to such an interesting matter!! Super helpful and appreciated.

I suppose my main complaint with Idealism is - why does the universe seem to act as though it continues to exist while it isn't being observed? If things which are not observed/observable do not exist, then why does assuming they -do- continue to exist seem to give us the right answer when predicting future behaviour of systems? Further, if the tree in the quad doesn't exist when nobody can perceive it, why is it there when we -do- look? If the lack of experience of it means it doesn't exist, then someone goes there, what decides whether or not there's something there to observe when someone tries? Invoking an Omnipresent Observer seems to trivialize the idea. If it is impossible for a thing to ever not be observed, then what does it even mean to say that something only exists when observed? The net effect is that things continue to exist.

"if to be is to be perceived, and if you can change the way you perceive, you can literally change the world"

On that last note about "change the way you perceive and you can change the world", it might be important to distinguish (as wasn't commonly done in Berkeley's time, but modern psychologists do) between perception, which is an active interpretive function, and sensation, which is just the passive reception of sense-data from the world. You don't, strictly speaking, sense the tree in the quad, but rather a pattern of colors and smells and so on. Interpreting those colors and smells, you then perceive, in those patterns, the tree. Berkeley's idealism really seems to mean "sense" when it says "perceive", but you can't voluntarily change the way that you sense, only the way that you interpret those senses, i.e. perceive. You can change the way you perceive in the modern sense of the word "perceive", but not in the word sense Berkeley seems to use.

I feel as if there's some pretty substantial equivocation going on here. You talk about whether an apple which can't be seen, smelled, felt, tasted, or experienced in any way exists, but you see what I said there: I said "can't be" - an apple which isn't currently being seen might still be see-able, an apple which isn't currently being tasted can still be taste-able. If there were an object which has no properties which allow it to interact in any way with our world, directly or indirectly, then it is an interesting question to ask whether or not it exists, and I could see the argument going either way depending on how you looked at it. But that's a very different question. As a point about "God perceiving everything, thus everything maintains existence" - I feel as though even if you totally accepted the idealism argument, God is still unnecessary for things to keep existing. Take the tree, unseen in the quad. Perhaps you are far enough away that you can't perceive it with your traditional senses, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't have some effect on you, or that it couldn't. The tree, for instance, releases oxygen, which is mixed into the air and may at some point affect any point on earth. It's very existence shapes the currents of the air and the way individual molecules fly about. It exerts a gravitational pull that permeates the entirety of the universe, even if unbelievably faintly. Sure, most of these effects are indirect, but then so is sight - we don't directly observe objects, we see light that has reflected off of it. At the atomic level, we never truly touch another thing. In short, it may be impossible to perceive objects, or it may be impossible not to perceive them. In the former case, the argument becomes unfounded because we haven't the slightest experience with perception, and in the latter case, the conclusion regarding a god becomes wholly unnecessary.

How does god exist if there is nobody there to perceive him? If he only exists because he perceives himself it seems a bit of a stretch, why couldn't a self aware invisible apple exist?

Idealism doesn't imply that there aren't objective truths...if I say that I'm an idealist that is synonymous with saying that idealism is objectively true.

This is a great video! Your getting more and more polished by the video!

You're doing great. You explain really well. All my doubt got cleared. Thank you

Mindblown - learned about this in school, but not to this extent! Thanks!! Awesome vid!

I'm glad you made a video on this. I was thinking about Idealism a lot recently

I remember that video four years ago like it was yesterday!!!

The problem of subjective reality is one of the underlying justifications for the scientific method. Publishing your methodology forces you to allow other people, with different subjective experiences, to observe the same phenomena in an independent context. That (and the idea of any sort of collective knowledge) allows us to smooth out the subjective differences in our lived experiences. I'm also reminded of Wittgenstein's example of semantic games, wherein not only do words mean different things to different people, but even to the same people in a different context. Our own subjectivity applied to ourselves, undermining our own past (or future) experiences of the objects around us.

Wow, you summarized the pitches I've been making for years into eight minutes. Bravo! Now I'm going to go watch all your videos, if you'll excuse me-

Hey Olli! Great reflecxtion! This kind of mixture between metaphysics and political theory is the one we must hear more often. I just want to add a little note that it can be usefull. I had once a chat with a historian. Today they do not intent to express the TRUE nature of past events (the objective thruth of past events) but their on reconstruction based on the data they have. They are pretty sure and used to the idea that they cannot reach THE objective thruth. In that sense, he told me that a good way to describe their approach to reality is to think it as an subjective approach. Based on their own culture, and so on. AND oppose the objective truth to arbitrary events. Everybody determines their reality, everybody has a subjective approach to reality. But it cannot be arbitrary. The antonym of objective must be arbitrary, not subjective. Sorry about my english! Greetings from Chile!

gotta philosophy exam today and this video hit. thank u brother.

Really good channel. Keep it up!

Thank you for this I have my mock exam on Epistemology next week :)

It's annoys me how he is called one of the "British philosophers" when he is Irish.

I can imagine the supersymmetric weakly interacting twins of the particles in the standard model. Those may not exist and may or may not have any way to detect them. But through the use of mathematical models of string theory, many physicists have imagined them.

Mentioned something on Twitter, but I'd love your view on a resource-based economy or Jacques Fresco and the Venus Project.

If you imagine an apple without visualizing its color, shape, weight, smell, then you are imagining its definition. It is still possible. Its like imagining a round square.

Thanks for the book recommendations. It would be a really interesting read. I was wondering that, as you put abstract concept into the physical argument of Berkeley, could it be that maybe the very abstraction of the concepts nullifies the net effect it delivers? For example, if I take the sexist/racist reference, it could be that I made neither a sexist or racist comment (or something which I didn't perceive as being either sexist or racist) but that the person affected by it 'perceived' it as sexist or racist, and if so, then I think, in their own right, neither of the participants are subjectively wrong, but right in their own way, isn't it? and if so, isn't the net effect of the conversation or the perceived accusation in the end nugatory, and kind of lost in subjective perceptions?

Eek. I remember this name from one of my most painful classes

I feel like bringing God into it is Berkeley taking the easy way out there and softening his philosophy. The position that reality exists subjectively puts not "minds" behind reality, but myself, because the observations that found the claim are my own. So it would make sense to say that everything exists only as I perceive it. But he then throws in the idea the objective existence of God (or else god would just be an extension of myself, and thus not able to perceive reality as an independent being). If the world only exists subjectively, but the same tree that I saw in the spring exists when I don't see it because God also sees it, this means there is a shared reality. And not only that, but he uses God as a way to say that we all share reality (because god is higher than all of us, and grounds all of reality). This makes his argument for idealism just convoluted materialism, imo. If reality is subjective, then the tree stops existing when I can't perceive it, and I may look back to the same spot, and there may be a tree there again. Or to paraphrase one of the worst philosophers ever, the world ends then I die.

Very interesting. Given me a lot to think about. I've always thought it's very important to try to see the world from as many different perspectives as possible but at the same time I believe adamantly in evidence based political policy. Do they go together? Probably but I'll have to think about it when it's not so early in the morning....

😍 thank you sooo much for beautiful explanation

Good work and current!

You tube is doing a great job. I can't do without you tube.

Fabulous films. Thank you!

I have a major problem with this notion that there _is no_ objective reality. I think it is entirely unnecessary if your goal is to stop "high and mighty intellectuals" from using violence to declare their point of view to be "truth". The same thing can be achieved by saying "there is an objective reality, but it is damn near impossible to get at it with our subjective minds" - that way, you don't have to rely on the logical "the world only exists because God is always perceiving it" loop, and it allows you to construct arguments such as "it has never been proven, and in fact there is plenty for evidence against, the claim that some races are more intelligent than others."

It seems like a contradiction to ask someone to imagine an apple without mass or volume and is undetectable in any way, because then it's no longer an apple, because apples are defined as having mass and volume (among other things). Also, in science the working definition of existence is pretty much to be detectable. So to ask one to imagine something that exists but isn't detectable seems to me the same thing as saying 'imagine something that exists, but doesn't'. It's also quite a leap to say that just because to be something has to be detectable, it has to be detectable by human beings.

it's interesting because at the quantum level the observing affects how atoms are perceived. I.e. double slit experiment

This was really good! I'd had a very naive view of Berkeley's idealism for years, and this really disabused me of some lingering silly scientism. However, I will continue to pronounce it the American way, because "Barclay" is a place in New York.

This is something I've never bought into. Also, when I tried imagining the apple, I some how imagined a, for lack of a better word, "presence" of an apple, when asked not to imagine it's qualities as perceived by the senses.

That´s a good vid on idealism :-) ... science = predicting experience ... love that :-9 Did you come up with that expression or is it a quote from somewhere ?

This dabbles into Standpoint Theory. :) I never thought to connect Berkeley to standpoint theory. Amazing!

This is curious! As far as I'm aware, I'd never heard about Berkeley or the concept of idealism (in this philosophical sense) before but a year or two ago I did wonder about a thought experiment where I tried to imagine a hypothetical particle that has no mass, no electric charge, no colour charge, no spin, it doesn't interact with any of the fundamental forces or fields. And I asked myself, "What does it mean for such a particle to exist?" In this context, I prefer the word 'interact' rather than 'observe' just to make it completely unambiguous in that the observer need not be human: if some part of the universe is reacting to another part of the universe, then an 'observation' or interaction has taken place, even if it's just a photon being absorbed or reflected.

So good. Thank you!!!!

Excellent lesson. How would Berkley's Idealism relate to Plato's Allegory of the Cave?

The idea that everything exists because god perceives feels like a cop-out answer. No one perceives God, so how do we know he's there to perceive it? By this very logic, god doesn't exist because no one perceives him, which then leaves the question: why does the tree change in the winter if no one is there to perceive it? Maybe I'm just not fundamentally getting that part. I do though, like the idea of the subjective mind. I've been reading Incognito by David Eagleman, and there he goes into the unconscious mind, and how our reality is shaped by how our brain works, not by how it actually is. They have an experiment where they have people push a button, and after a delay, a sound goes off. As you push the button, you become use to the delay, so it sounds less like a delay and more like it just happens when you hit the button. Your brain connects the two things. But, if they actually change it so it actually does go off when you push it, your brain perceives the sound as going off before you've pressed the button. This isn't true, but it is in your reality. Then there are the people with Anton's Syndrome, a condition where these people are blind, but don't know they're blind. They will get angry and uncooperative if you tell them they are blind, because they say they can see. They will say confidently that you have 2 fingers up and in a blue shirt, when you actually have 4 and in a red shirt. The brain generates these images. Their brains' have lost the ability to make sense of and take in information, so it makes it up. That's what your mind has to do. And when it doesn't understand, it fills in the gaps. What you perceive is not an objective look at the world. My point is that there are specific parts of your brain where it's their job to interpret the information coming into your system. Parts that can have lots of strange effect, like capgras syndrome, when damaged. And those parts depend on where you grew up, how you were born, and how you have treated your brain until that point. Not some objective, "well, this is how it is" kind of way. So yea. That thing about it being more subjective than you realize. But like, with the words of a neuroscientist backing you up (not me, I'm 18. David Eagleman. Check it out. I actually feel like it kinda butts head with what you were saying in your video about creativity, and how the unconsious mind doesn't play as big a role as we thought.)

awesome video!

such a charming way to explain philsophy...

Saying that reality exists literally inside your own head is what Berkeley fought to disprove. The idea of your self existing inside your own brain mass actually exists inside your own mind, same as the idea of reality existing inside your head is a mind construct. The reason people are still believing in such absurd constructs is that our everyday life is organised on grounds of this arcane understanding. And the language itself hasn't been updated since..

It was interesting and useful to see you move from Berkeley to real life applications. But did he mean the same thing?

If to be is to be perceived, and there is an object of perception, wouldn't there then have to be things existing prior to our perceiving it? For what, then, would we have to perceive if all that is is from of our minds? It would be like a blank canvas: nothing but a frame holding up emptiness. It would seem that there would need to be Content, in order to Perceive; but without a structure or "frame," nothing intelligible would come of it. What do you think?

Keep doing this. Thanks 👍

Unrelated, but speaking about an older video (it's an older video sir, but it still checks out): Wisecrack just did a video on the philosophical mess that underpins the Assassin's Creed series, and seeing how you did one a while ago, I wondered what your take on their video is.

I already studied Berkeley's metaphysics in college, but this gave me a slightly new/extended perspective on the subject (excuse the pun ;D).

I searched on google regarding idealism but the information is not very useful to have good understandings.This video has clarified my conception of idealism..Thank you sir

love the character development dude

Cool video, it's nice to think that idealism may be applicable beyond metaphysics. However, at 1:43 you said something a little confusing. You seemed to suggest that the claim "to be is to be perceived" is equivalent to claiming that something exists if and only if it is "at least in principle" perceptible. But isn't Berkeley committed to something slightly different: something exists if and only if it is in fact being perceived? I thought Berkeley was committed to this latter claim, but much later idealists like Husserl (and maybe others within the phenomenological tradition) stuck to the former. The measure of something's existence being a matter of (perceptual) fact vs. a matter of (perceptual) principle are very different and should be kept apart, I think. Thanks.

I love your videos. With that said, an attempt to standardize your audio levels from one video to another would help my ears and speakers. The audio seems to be always clear mind you but the volume is so drastically different it makes marathoning your work rather painful. Content is great though

Olly you should cosplay as Dr. Strange. Best, Hannah

The end was definitely a stretch. If all there is is what I (can) experience, how is the account of other people's experience worth anything to me?

This concept reminds me of that physical concept of Force, or even gravity. We can't observe it, but we can observe its effects. Oh, that point was just made at 3:23. I should watch the videos through to the end before posting comments.

This is very interesting as somebody with aphantasia. I have no minds eye so if I were to imagine an apple I don't imagine a smell, taste touch etc. I don't imagine anything based upon sense at all but the idea of an apple is incredibly clear to me.

I think "Intacto" with Max Von Sydow is a good examination of this because part of the plot is that everyone plays a game of chance - so can you observe luck subjectively or objectively? But also, everyone playing this game of chance has their picture taken which gets stored in a file - so they are kind of always known about. And really weird is that if each player in this game touches another player then they can loose their luck (to someone who is more lucky). Bit of a creepy satire of economics.

The idealism of Berkeley is called solipsism. Its not true that you can close idealism in sentence "to be is to be percived". Idealism by itself is a lot wider term (naturally word 'idealism' derives from Plato's "eidos"; ideas in Plato's writings are 'over-real' "existances" (i dont know how greek terms "To On/Ta Onta" are translated in english), wich are not sense-percived; for instance math, geometry, propotions, Kalagatia (good-beauty idea) and imagies [potential existences] of all things which exist; SO IDEALISM is belive that there are things which cant be percived by senses but only mind). So you would call not only philosophy of Berkeley "idealism", but also Descartes's, Saint Augustin's (shortly: in all christian philosophies), Plato's, Plotyn's, Kant's, Hegel's, Hume's, Leibnitz's, Newton (ye, he was not only concerned by math-phisics [again: there is no proper word in english or i dont know one to name math-phisics as a opposition to empirical phisics] but also philosophy) and so.

What video about John Locke are you referring to? I can't find it on your channel.

The problem is that you cannot change the way you perceive rendering the whole political spiel moot.

I agree with saying that our understanding of the world is based on experiences in our minds and that there's no way to definitively prove the existence of an objective, outside world, but I don't agree with saying that external objects therefore don't exist unless they're being perceived. Do I simply not understand Berkeley, or is this an actual point of disagreement?

I honestly find it hard to be convinced that imagination, hallucinations and dreams should be considered as much real as the waking world. Maybe reality is subjective, but maybe not as much?

even if you can't smell or feel the weight, you could still have an abstract idea of the apple or the code in a programme?

Hey, is there any way to hit a copyright case on Berkeley??!! It seems that he stole MY thoughts! I've been thinking about this SAAMMEEEEE shit since the 9th standard and now I came to know that there is actually a well defined concept AND IT HAS GOT A NAME TOO, IDEALISM, which has been proposed by this famous old philosopher from the past!!! Ughhhhhh. This is unfair. :(

please do a video on buddhist thought!! (Nagarjuna's The Middle Way especially the ideas of emptiness and ultimate reality vs. conventional reality) It's super interesting and definitely goes hand-in-hand with Idealism and how things do not inherently exist in our world.

Well, that challenge with imagining apple is pretty interesting, but doesn't really proves idealism. Maybe color wouldn't exist if there were no minds around, but volume or weight would exist anyway.

I loved the take on his philosophy the regular view isn't that interesting almost a caricature. Every time someone mentions Berkley I have the urge to read Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius again, beautiful short story.

As my new favorite game Person 5 expressed "If you want to change the world, all you have to do is just look at it differently..."

Man I like this information ...very interesting ...explained well

I would like someone with knowledge of physics to explain how that applies to the idea that a quarks existence is not set until it's observed

It seems to me as if this overlooks a much simpler idea, which is that things exist without being perceived and our senses are designed in some way to perceive that which is reality - whether evolution or God is what you believe to have shaped humans into their current form, this holds up well, because there is a definite advantage to perceiving reality more or less as it is. The important distinction here is that an object still exists without something to perceive it, under this framework, and that, while our perceived reality and the real reality are different, our perceived reality is designed to create an approximation of the real reality. Edit: Also, a thing which is imperceptible may in fact be real, but by definition we would never be able to observe that thing in any way, so that thing would be kind of useless to us in every single imaginable way.

The tree is alive. Living organisms perceive and react, even trees and microbes.Very anthropocentric.

BBC In Our Time had a good episode on Berkeley's Idealism. Available at www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03y36vr

what book or text should I get to look more into idealism and Berkeley>?

The Pauli Exclusion Principle states that no particle can occupy the same point in space - so what if you could observe all the points in the universe except for one point? You would know that by observing all the other points that the point left over that you didn't observe must be a point that exists (with a particle in it - virtual or not) simply by fact that it was the only point left. This is pretty much impossible to do though. But this is where objective and subjective kinda mean the same thing?

Even if you take the universal observer out of Subjective Idealism, it is still a complete reality. If all that exists is my mind, what my mind creates (i.e. perceives) is all of reality. It just means that only "I" exist.

I don't get it. If I would put an apple in a box, no one would perceive the apple. But the apple still exists. So it doesn't matter whether or not the apple is perceived, it's whether or not it's perceptible in principle, as you said. But in principle, humans and every material thing is perceptible. So why wouldn't we exist?

I think that an apple is more than mass, volume, smell or taste. Just think about it, if you cut an apple into two pieces, its shape change, but still an apple, same happens when time pass and his taste is constantly changing. Or let´s analyse another situation, there´s a buch of plastic fruit, someone take one of this plastic forms and aks you "what´s this?" and your first reaction is to answer "it´s an apple". So, what´s really an apple? Maybe is more like an abstract concept, an idea. And that lead to my final question, do we perceive concepts? Because is we don´t, then they do not exist, and how do we know about things that doesn´t exist?

Good stuff.

I think there's three other answers to where material things go if they're not perceived. 1) So long as we exist we are always perceiving even if it isn't brought to conscious clarity and distinctness. This was argued by Leibniz: the windowless monads perceive all other monads while in existence however weakly. It isn't as if our sense organs stop working when we aren't paying to attention to some thing, it's precisely the activity of our senses and imagination that produces these ideas passively or actively. It's just that our minds are attuned to detect certain phenomena relevant to us and filter out the rest. 2) Space and time and causality are not empirically real in themselves. The Kantian position but which I think has some physical credibility today. When we ask about something not perceived we usually mean like the past in time or something at a distance in space not immediately perceived. But if space time are phenomenal then these things are in existence somehow instantaneously as if already happened (logical fatalism) and as in 1) perceived by us at all times. 3) Occasionalism which was influential in Islamic philosophy. Not only is causality not real in itself but all things and events are unique instantaneous moments created and recreated according to god or whatever you believe in. Change is illusory. The world actually does disappear altogether without the intervention of an acting force like god or Schopenhauer's will (voluntarism) which alone makes things happen and seemingly interact. Schopenhauer said the universe began with the opening of the eye.

The apple is just the bundle of perceptions. It's what ties the taste to the colour to all the other properties.

What if I imagine a math formula that draws my mental image of an apple on a 3d graph? But I guess that would make us question “does math exists?”

Awesome!

if i can hold an apple with no perception of its touch, it feels like nothing but i'm unable to close my hand any further, and then i take a bite, I have no taste, my jaw has to exert force but i don't exactly feel the resistance, and then i get nourishment from the apple, which is completely non-sensual anyways. does the apple still not exist?

I feel like the captions should say "Burkeley" whenever you don't do the "ah" on that e.

you missed something HUGE whn talking about subatomic particles. One interpretation of quantum mecanics is that things does not exist if we do not see them/ acknowledge their existence. and the leading interpretation is that any characteristic they might have in situations exterior to measurement should be ignored and only their existence in the experiment is important ( because EVERYTHING stop working otherwise, no joke. its fascisnatig)

Can someone please explain me what is the difference between the use of the word "theory" in a philosophical context and its use in a scientific context?

Observance is what needs to be explored. I have had tried to explain that the way I have gone about it. The experience of objects can be deduced from the fact that they one "are being the thing" and that objects are subject to all others to determine their "being". The metaphor you used is through the conscious mind of a human, but it is rational to conclude that the object that is our body is already aware of other things independently of our percieving it. Shopenhauer used kantian logic to come to this conclusion.

isn't the idea that everything is always being perceived by someone kinda nonsense though? i live alone so currently no one is looking at my eyes, and i can't see them myself unless i look in a mirror, so do they not exist? or does the fact that i can feel they're there through the fact that i'm using them and i can blink them just mean i'm perceiving them in a physical sense and not a visual sense? also doesn't his idea that we can tell things like atoms and microorganisms are there because "we can see their effects/we just Know they're there because we did experiments" apply to... almost everything, regardless of whether or not we can see them? and doesn't it contradict his entire hypothesis because he's claiming they exist even though we can't see them, because scientists saw them once, therefore they always exist?

If a tree falls in the forest and no one was around to hear it, does it make a noise? Yes. Any microscopic action has a microscopic effect on the next thing etc. which, in turn will eventually travel to someone who can be affected by it

This is great. Too often Berkeley gets summed up in a quick "Reality is made of ideas and the world only exists when you're looking at it." Not enough teachers bother going deep enough into it that he doesn't sound ridiculous.

Hi Ollie. Regarding who is in the best position to determine if an action is raciest/sexist. Would not the person undertaking the action in question have a truer understanding of the motivation behind an action, rather than someone who is perceiving the action or being affected by it?Sure, the person undertaking the raciest/sexist action may be dishonest about their motivation, but they would still be in a better position to understand the workings of their own mind than someone else.

the first gorgeous person ive found doing philosophy on youtube...